On the Road Again - Adventures from an Empty Nest

Manitoba and the Great Lakes

The Souris, Manitoba, swinging bridge

(Many more photos at the end of the post)

I ended the last blog entry with a teaser: we were headed to Souris, Manitoba, the next day. I was tickled because “souris” is the French word for “mouse”. Souris turned out to be a lovely place, with a long pedestrian suspension bridge, a great bakery, and a delightful town museum. The tagline on Manitoba license plates is “Friendly Manitoba”, and it’s true. Since leaving the Southeast, we hadn’t experienced those casual friendly conversations one can have with strangers during the course of a regular day. But Manitobans are eager to engage, and will start a conversation just about anywhere. We learned about the region, heard about travels people have taken, got advice on great places to see in the region, commiserated about the shortage of rain this summer, and fielded questions about where we had been on our trip so far. Thanks, Manitoba, for such a warm welcome.

Manitoba itself was lovely, too. We got as far north as Dauphin and Riding Mountain National Park. Heading back south, we visited beautiful Portage la Prairie, where Joe washed the van while I did laundry, and then we got the windshield repaired – the casualty of a stone kicked up on a gravel road.

Next stop was Winnipeg, an impressive city with an amazing riverfront park called the Forks. We explored a bit on foot before retiring for the night in the train station parking lot. Unfortunately, we got there Sunday too late to visit the Canadian Human Rights Museum, and it’s closed on Mondays, so we’ll have to come back another time. We visited the Winnipeg Market in the morning for breakfast and another walk along the river.

Then it was on to Ontario, where we spent the night at a gas station back lot in Kenora. (Kenora was named for the amalgamation of three communities on the shores of Lake of the Woods: Keewatin, Norman, and Rat Portage, a translation of the original Ojibwa name for the area, where muskrats were common.) Kenora has a beautiful harbor and attractive downtown, and we were introduced to the Ontario food-truck specialty Beaver Tails, oval fried bread with sweet toppings. Mine was maple syrup and powdered sugar. Yum! But opiates and other toxic drugs have also made their mark on Kenora. Site of a $200,000 drug bust in June, Kenora streets were home to a distressing number of young people in the frozen poses of despair that mark serious addiction. I don’t know if it’s the stagnant economy of the region, or the proximity to the international border, or something else, but Kenora has much higher rates of addition and homelessness than the rest of the province, according to local news reports. Surrounded by such beauty, it was sad to see so many young lives interrupted in this way.

After Kenora, we headed south and crossed the border at Fort Frances/International Falls back into the US, for a visit to Voyageurs National Park, described by the Park Service as “a place of transition between land and aquatic ecosystems, between southern boreal and northern hardwood forests, and between wild and developed areas.” The park is named for the French fur traders who rowed huge boats through the boundary waters to buy otter pelts for the European hat industry. We had never heard of it, and were so glad to discover it.

We paid our respects to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone at a roadside memorial near the site of the plane crash that killed him and seven others in 2002. It’s a beautiful little park with a commemorative trail and informational signs. It made us wonder how different American politics might be now had he lived. If you don’t know about Paul Wellstone, you might want to learn more here.

The only downside of our visit there was our encounter with the Minnesota State Bird.

Mosquitoes here don’t attack in twos or threes; they travel in battalions and armies. We spent a long evening trying to squish all the mosquitoes who swarmed into the van when we opened the door for just a second at the memorial site. Bites on our hands and faces – the only parts left exposed while we slept – showed we’d missed some.

Duluth was our next big stop. Since Bellair Market stopped selling cake donuts and Spudnuts closed, Johnson Bakery in Duluth may be the new best place in the world for donuts. And we’ve had donuts in a lot of places. SO good! If you’re ever there, stop in. It’s a multi-generational family-run place with a few eat-in tables and coffee to wash your donuts down with. You’ll thank us.

Duluth is a city that is braced for winter, even in July. Downtown is a network of skywalks linking the second floors of all the buildings, so you can go from one to the other without braving the winter cold. On the day we were there, it was 60°, raining, and windy, so the defenses seemed warranted. Duluth also has a lovely boardwalk behind the downtown area overlooking Lake Superior, which we walked because it was there, but we got pretty cold and wet! Brr!

Guided by a very enthusiastic and informative woman at the Northern Wisconsin Welcome Center in Superior, across the river from Duluth, we crossed the state’s Iron Range region, an intensely rural and beautiful part of the country. The Apostle Islands National Seashore on Lake Superior was particularly stunning.

The last two days of the week found us traveling through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, visiting fruit farms and national parks, and experiencing the majesty of Tahquamenon Falls, the second largest waterfall east of the Mississippi after Niagara, where more than 50,000 gallons of water drop into the canyon every second.

Again and again we find ourselves marveling at what an incredible continent we live on. Now only two weeks from home, we are finding it even more precious to note how rich and varied our natural world is, and how interesting the people are who live there. We truly are fortunate to have been able to travel so much of it this summer, to get the unique perspective that only travel affords.

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